Artificial Tay Tay

Posted on April 3, 2025 by thezman

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Note: Last night, Paul and I did a whole show on AI and the possible consequences of humanity being enslaved by robots. You can watch the replay here and here.

An unresolved mystery in popular culture is why Taylor Swift has become a megastar on the level of Elvis and Michael Jackson. There are plenty of simple explanations like her songs resonate with young females or she is non-threatening, but those apply to many pop stars, yet none have reached the heights of Swift. There is an answer, and it lies in the fundamentals of human psychology, but that answer also suggests that Swift is the death of the pop star phenomenon.

The place to start is with the most popular answer to why Swift is the biggest pop star of the 21st century: her lyrics. The most popular explanation for Swift’s popularity with young females is her songs resonate with them. Yet when you look at her most popular songs, they predate her supposedly young female audience. Her biggest hit is from seventeen years ago. Her next biggest is from eleven years ago. Most of her big hits are from over a decade ago.

That is the strange thing about Taylor Swift. Everyone assumes that her core audience is young females, but in reality, it is middle-aged single white women. Taylor Swift is a middle-aged woman performing hits from over a decade ago. She is a strange mix of current fads and recent nostalgia. Look at her audience and it is the young-ish females you see kicking around the cubicle farms of corporate America, and thirsty males who think a Taylor Swift concert is an opportunity for them.

As to the lyrics of the songs, there is nothing to suggest they are the hook that reels in her core audience. They are echolalic babbling. Pop music at its best is doggerel set to a simple but catchy tune. Most pop songs, especially female power pop, have a simple chorus that expresses a simple emotion, while the rest is gibberish. That is what you see with Taylor Swift songs. Her music also comes with helpful expositions so the listener can contextualize the simple chorus.

The point here is that there is nothing unique about what Taylor Swift is doing to explain her massive popularity. Her formula is the same as every female pop star when it comes to the music itself. Watch a Swift concert, however, and it is clear that the audience is not there for the music. They are there to see Swift. Like Elvis seventy years ago, Swift is popular for being Taylor Swift now. Her popularity rests on being a social phenomenon to her audience.

She is a social phenomenon because she brings other things to the female pop star formula that suggest she may be the last human pop star. The first thing to note is Swift is what young guys call “mid”. Now that she is pushing forty, she is getting a bit dumpy, but even in her prime she was a solid seven, the sort of girl old women would describe as pretty, which meant not homely but not sexy. In fact, her unique quality in the pop ranks is she lacks anything resembling sex appeal.

There is one caveat here: she has naturally unique eyes. This may be why she is so wildly popular with near-middle-age white women. White women put enormous importance on their eyes because it is hugely important to white people, who have a staggering variety of eye colors compared to nonwhites. A woman’s eyes are what will catch the attention of a male, which is why there is so much diversity in the eye color of people from Europe, especially northern Europe.

Women’s makeup puts the focus on the eyes. In some countries, like Iceland, women use makeup so you cannot help but focus on their eyes. In a land full of the most beautiful women on earth, the eyes are what matter. As women age, they tend to focus more on their hair and makeup, with the eyes being the focus. It is also why overweight women tend to wear a lot of makeup. The otherwise average-looking Taylor Swift is an appealing role model for her audience due to her eyes.

There is also the fact that Swift seems to be a boring person. There is no drama in her life or sex tapes leaked on the internet. The few interviews she gives are as compelling as watching paint dry. The closest she gets to drama is dating a football player who is not the quarterback or a superstar. For the women who could not land the star quarterback in high school, this makes Swift weirdly relatable. For her audience, Taylor Swift is the mirror who says they are the fairest of them all.

There are other things leading to Swift’s stardom, but the picture that emerges from these general observations is that it is a formula. Pop music has always relied on these formulas, but they were based on wisdom and experience. Now they can be based on massive data sets crunched by artificial intelligence. The data from who consumes different types of pop music can be combined with the human sciences, the history of pop music, and the software to create the music.

Soon, maybe even now, music executives can ask a couple of DOGE kids to create a pop star maker. They will be given access to the history of pop music, demographics of the current audience, and the quickly growing body of information from the human behavior sciences. They will then produce the attributes of stars in each music genre, their target audience, and expected revenue numbers. In other words, templates for every form of popular musical star.

Instead of hiring actors to play the part, like the boy band producers did in the last century, the music execs will ask their AI engineers to create them. The technology can already produce the audio, and the video will be here soon. That means in weeks an artificial Tay Tay can be beamed to the mobile devices of the target audience and through social media. Their reaction to the “new act” can be used to subtly tweak the “artist’s” algorithm based on those responses.

This may sound absurd but watch a Taylor Swift show and what you see are people holding up their mobile devices. People under the age of forty experience the world now through their mobile device. Theirs is already a meta-existence when it comes to experiencing things in the meatspace. This is accelerating with each wave of people entering adulthood. What matters to them most is not flesh and blood humans, but the avatars in the alternative reality of the internet.

Even if it does not reach the point of replacing humans entirely, it is easy to see why the pop star will not survive much longer. Taylor Swift is proof of concept. She is highly controllable, does not create drama, and ticks the necessary boxes that the formula says are required to be a star. Mass-producing many versions of this with cheaply acquired talent and software is the logical next step, maybe even allowing fans to create their own version of their favorite act.

That is the other thing AI will bring to music. Based on prompts and reactions from the target audience, the act can quickly evolve to their liking. The same process by which you prompt AI to create an image can be silently incorporated into the production of the next Taylor Swift. Not only can AI make the next Taylor Swift, but it will also allow the listener to create their own Taylor Swift. Artificial intelligence will allow everyone to have their own artificial reality in which their Taylor Swift speaks to them.

All of this assumes that some as yet unforeseen consequence to the rollout of AI does not bring the roof down on all of us. Even what we can contemplate opens the doors for life-altering consequences. Technology has destroyed the societal consensus. Just imagine what happens when we have our own popular reality stars. Even so, what Taylor Swift tells us is that the pop star as a human phenomenon is dead. She is the proof of concept that will lead to the Artificial Tay Tay.

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Essential Violence

Posted on April 2, 2025 by thezman

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Note: Paul is back from vacation, so that means we are back tonight for the Wednesday livestream, which you can find here and here. You can also watch on Twitter, but there is no link until it is live. Just go to Paul’s Twitter page. The show kicks off at 8:00 PM EDT and the topic tonight is AI.

In 19th century America, it was popular to argue that there are four boxes for maintaining political liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and cartridge. There is also a version that has just three boxes, which drops the jury box from the model. The soap box is public speech used to persuade the ruling class. The ballot box is the democratic process. The jury box is the legal process, and the cartridge box is violence. The order of the boxes is important as it is both a warning and a promise.

The warning here is directed toward the public. Skipping any of these steps will inevitably be self-defeating. The sorts of people who want to litigate everything, for example, are the sorts of people who will litigate away your liberty. We see this with the inferior court judges. They are like all self-defined underdogs. When they get on top, they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people they opposed. These people are always more dangerous than present tyrants.

The other side of this is directed at the people in charge. Their status as a ruling elite depends on making sure that the traditional rights and protections of the people are maintained in those first two boxes. Once the people abandon the soap box and the ballot box for the jury box, it is not long before they reach for the cartridge box, and there is no turning back from that one. Of course, an elite that uses the jury box to undermine the ballot box is asking for the cartridge box.

That is what we see in the West: the use of lawfare by the managerial class to both circumvent the soap box and the ballot box. The latest example is in France, where the courts have willy-nilly decided that the most popular politician in the country is no longer allowed to participate in politics. Marine Le Pen was found guilty of trumped-up charges and sentenced to what amounts to internal banishment. Her punishment is like what happened to Khrushchev in the 1960s.

This is the pattern in the West. Romania arrested and then banned the most popular politician in the country for the crime of winning the election. Germany is planning to ban the AfD for the crime of being popular. The new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has publicly stated that one of his goals will be to work with the EU to overthrow the Hungarian government. Of course, the UK has declared itself an apartheid state by imposing a two-tiered legal regime aimed at the opposition.

The most famous example of the managerial class abuse of the jury box to circumvent the soap and ballot box is Donald Trump. They tried to remove him from office in his first term, then rigged the 2020 election to deny him a second term. When he did not get the message, they used lawfare against him in the same way we see in Europe, except that Trump managed to win at the jury box. Note they reached for the cartridge box when they failed at the jury box.

The assassination of Trump is a good reminder that it is almost always the case that once either side of the political system reaches the jury box, one side or the other will reach for the cartridge box. The jury box is where irreconcilable differences are confirmed to both sides, no matter the result. The reason there is always the smell of sulfur around attorneys is not only due to who they serve. It is also because sulfur is an essential element of gunpowder.

What we see happening in the West is a reminder that the last box in that formulation is essential to preserve the three other boxes. The 19th century French social thinker, Georges Sorel, explained that political violence is not a sign of chaos, but a healthy antidote to political oppression. It is often the creative destruction needed to free the political marketplace so it can produce healthy politics. Violence also has the effect of energizing the people to defend their ancient liberties.

Thomas Jefferson made a similar point in his famous letter to William Smith from which we get the famous quote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Jefferson was not justifying political violence for its own sake. He pointed out that violent resistance is often a necessary reminder to the ruling class of what lies ahead if they ignore the soap box and the ballot box. Shays’ Rebellion was a warning and a promise.

It may be why American oligarchs joined the Trump team. When Luigi Mangione popped out from behind the car to gun down that insurance executive, it let every oligarch know the cartridge box remains an option. If French judges and politicians suddenly come down with lead poisoning, maybe the poseur class in Paris will suddenly rethink their position too. If not, then it guarantees the French end up at the cartridge box anyway.

This is the most likely end for the West as a whole. The Trump reforms will surely fail, as reform is almost always an effort to relieve the pressure of general discontent while maintaining the status quo. In Europe, the ruling class is nakedly hostile to the native population, hellbent on pulling the roof down to spite the people. They will not be talked out of their positions, and they will not be voted out of them. Since the courts are now owned by the managerial class, it leaves the last option.

The irony of all this is that the great lesson of Western history is that liberty only comes when the people join to spill blood. As the sun sets on Western man, this truth is becoming clearer with each outrage by the ruling class. The people endlessly yelping about “our democracy” are killing the West. It is only through the blood of these parasites and vermin that the new Western man will regain his lands and liberty. After the jury box comes the cartridge box.

No Peace

Posted on April 1, 2025 by thezman

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After a flurry of peace talks in Saudi Arabia, the Trump peace initiative regarding the war in Ukraine seems to have run out of steam. The last round of talks stalled over the conditions required to create a Black Sea ceasefire. The Russians laid out the conditions they would require, the conditions they agreed to in 2022 under the Black Sea grain deal. Ukraine flatly rejected those terms this time. The Europeans have also made clear that they will never agree to peace.

After Ukraine and the EU rejected the terms, Putin said some things that got little note in the West but were clearly a signal to the Trump administration. The first was at a meeting of Russian industrialists where Putin told them that despite talks with Washington, they should not expect the end of sanctions. The new world order, so to speak, is one in which the Russian economy will operate independently of the West and within the framework of BRICS.

That was a clear signal to the Trump people that ending sanctions was not a carrot and new sanctions are not a stick. The Russians have moved on from the old model where their economy was connected to the Western model. Despite the last three years, the West remains convinced that sanctions are working, and that Russia desperately wants back into the Western economic model. Until the Trump administration sees the folly in this, negotiations with Russia will go nowhere.

Another thing Putin said was in response to a question at a public event about the Trump effort to get a ceasefire. Putin said there will not be a Minsk 3. This is a reference to prior deals with the West over Ukraine. In Minsk 1 and Minsk 2, the Russians agreed to get trapped Western advisors in the war zone free of the Donbass militias in exchange for a peace deal that never materialized. In both cases, the West just poured more weapons into Ukraine.

This is a very sore subject for Russians. They see these prior deals as efforts to trick and humiliate them. When Trump publicly asked Putin to let the trapped Ukrainian troops in Kursk escape, it set off alarm bells in Moscow. It looked like the same old tricks from the Western tricksters. That is the reason Putin made a point of saying there will never be a Minsk 3. He was telling the Russian public and the Russian elite that he will not be fooled a third time.

That has led to two other things Putin said last week. One is he said the Russian army is ready to finish off the Ukrainian army. That is a bold statement, out of character for Putin. He has been warning of a five- or ten-year war since the West cancelled the Istanbul agreements. To now talk about a quick end of the war suggests that something big is on the drawing board. It could also mean the Ukrainian army is in far worse shape than is being reported.

This comment about the end of the war came with a comment about putting Ukraine into what amounts to receivership. Putin suggested that the post-war process would start with the removal of the Kiev government and put the administration of the country into the hands of a UN group. This caused Trump to call NBC’s Manjaw Crazyeyes and rant about being “pissed off” at Putin. He said he is planning to apply new sanctions to Russia in response to these statements.

What all of this points to is that the Trump peace initiative is dead. The Russians were willing to listen, but now that it is clear that Trump has no leverage over Ukraine or Europe, there is no point in continuing the charade. The war in Ukraine will end by military means and then maybe there can be a negotiated settlement. That was the point Putin was making last week. Whether or not the Trump administration understands this is unknown.

The Pentagon, on the other hand, at least the permanent elements, independent of the administration, does get this. They wrote a long, mendacious thriller for the New York Times where they blame the failure of Project Ukraine on the Ukrainians and to a lesser extent the Trump administration. It is a long post worth reading for no other reason than it is a great example of narrative fantasy. It is written like a spy thriller because it is mostly self-serving fiction.

If you want to know why Western politicians seem to be so clueless about so much, it is because they rely on the storytellers called the media for their version of reality. All over Washington, staffers for elected officials read that Times story, shocked to learn that the American military has been running the war from the start. Normal people have known this since day one because the internet exists and people use it, but elected officials get their reality from the media.

The main point of that work of fiction is to make clear that the Ukraine failure was not the fault of the Military Industrial Complex. All the weapons were, in fact, wonder weapons that totally crushed those primitive Russians. NATO tactics were the best and completely baffled those drunken Russkies. The people who brought you the F-35 want to make clear that when the Russian flag is in Maidan Square, it was the fault of the people who refused to let the American military win the war.

As an aside, if you can get past the self-serving fiction, the article reveals just how close we were to extinction. There were people willing to go all in on attacking Russia, which would have provoked a nuclear retaliation. Unsaid, but implied, is that there were people willing to go nuclear, maybe even preemptively. If the Trump administration is serious about changing foreign policy, a top priority must be hunting down those people and permanently removing them from society.

Putting that aside, what all of this tells us is that there will be no negotiated settlement to the Ukraine war, at least not until things on the battlefield change. Perhaps when the Ukrainian army begins to break in a major way, reality will get over the media firewall into the brains of the political classes in the West. Maybe the Trump administration understands this, maybe not. It does not matter because they are not in control of events, so they can only stand by and watch.

Changing Times

Posted on March 31, 2025 by thezman

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Note #1: Behind the green door, there is a post about the massive Disney flop Snow White, a post about basketball, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Scan social media, comments on sites that still allow them, new media platforms like livestreaming services, and what becomes clear is that support for Israel in the United States is shifting. The days of “right-wing” influencers portraying Israel as the frontline of freedom are long gone. Instead, there is mostly indifference, with a fair amount of criticism. So-called left-wing influencers are aggressively antagonistic toward Israel, siding with the Arabs.

The one place where enthusiasm for Israel remains strong is Washington. The Trump administration is cartoonishly pro-Israel, often coming off as a parody of the old pro-Israel stance among conservatives. The Republican Party is similarly over-the-top in its celebration of Israel, as if it worships Israelis. Senator Tom Cotton rarely speaks about his home state, preferring instead to focus on Israel. Even Democrats act as though Israel is their ancestral homeland.

In time, the events of October 7, 2023, may be seen as a turning point for Israel’s relationship with the United States. Rather than sparking another round of American-led violence in the region, it may prove to be the moment that bursts the Israel bubble. Until then, supporting Israel was the default position among the American public, with only fringe voices expressing opposition. Since that day, however, the public square has become a battleground over Israel.

Israel seems to be losing that fight. Young people no longer support Israel, and it is only among senior citizens that you see the old enthusiasm. More accurately, the old enthusiasm exists only with old white people who vote Republican. Demographics play a big role here, as the younger generations are less white. Of course, it also means that the actuarial tables are working hard against the pro-Israel position. In ten years, support for Israel will probably collapse.

This does not mean, as some suggest, that Americans are becoming antisemitic or that a dark historical figure is poised for a comeback. Rather, for an increasing number of Americans, the romanticized view of Jews has faded. Events from eighty years ago no longer shape their thinking. Jews do not hold a special place in their imagination, and as a result, Israel is seen as just another country. More and more, Americans are evaluating Israel through the lens of American interests.

One reason for this is the heavy-handed tactics employed after October 7 to bully Americans into siding with Israel. In this age of widespread mendacity, overegging the pudding raises suspicions. The outlandish claims made by people like Ben Shapiro quickly turned a tragedy into a conspiracy theory. Instead of sympathy for Israel, a majority began to suspect shenanigans. When they called it their 9/11, that seemed to confirm we were being conned yet again into war.

It is fair to say that the year following the attack was an example of disastrous public relations that alienated many Americans. Exaggerated claims about Arabs eating babies and scripted social media campaigns were quickly identified and debunked online. Then came the carpet bombing of Gaza, which struck many as monstrous. While Israel was undoubtedly the victim, indiscriminately bombing apartment buildings and hospitals is still seen as immoral.

The weird thing about the year of ham-fisted public relations is that it was as if the Israel Lobby forgot the internet existed. It was very much an old school media campaign, for a time when the media was four television channels and a local newspaper, not a time when Telegram channels have up-to-the-minute video from even the most remote places in the world. It was a media campaign run by old people for old people who still watch the nightly news.

There is also the fact that, for over a decade, anyone questioning official narratives has been branded as “Hitler.” On the one hand, this rhetoric enrages people. On the other hand, it has become a signal that kooks and crazies are about to create chaos. The Israel Lobby foolishly aligned itself with the unstable elements of the left, and now, it is tarnished by association with the same activists who toppled statues and caused societal unrest.

This complacency is another factor in Israel’s declining support. Since the 1980s, life has been easy for the Israel Lobby. Their critics were banished in the 1990s, so they merely had to issue press releases to get what they wanted. Over time, this made them lazy. Like all lobbying machines, they became focused on Washington, neglecting grassroots efforts. Now, their critics control the grassroots and the new media that inform the next generation.

A larger issue for Israel and its supporters is that the United States is a big country facing big challenges. Israel is a small country. Naturally, it cannot remain at the top of America’s priority list. Furthermore, the Israel Lobby represents only a tiny fraction of the American public. Minoritarianism is unsustainable—just ask Assad. The great tectonic plates of human civilization are shifting against the current Israeli paradigm. The so-called Jewish century is over, and both Jews and Israel must adapt.

Again, this does not mean that a historical villain is making a comeback or that Ben Shapiro will soon be selling tickets to concentration camps to keep the Daily Wire afloat. Americans are not naturally bigoted, despite demographic changes. It simply means that the dominance of the Israel Lobby and the victimhood culture that has shaped Jewish identity for half a century are fading. Like many aspects of the 20th century, these things will soon be relics of the past.

Radio Derb March 28 2025

Posted on March 28, 2025 by thezman

This Week’s Show

Contents

00m46s What would Confucius do?
11m36s Place Your Betz (on civil war)
21m04s Downgrading, legitimacy, and feral cities
38m02s King Charles wants us back
39m50s Ashli Babbitt remembered (Trump reminded)
41m43s Lithuanian wisdom
41m43s Signoff with Dickie Valentine

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Transcript

01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! This is your luxuriantly genial host John Derbyshire with comments on the passing scene.

My comments this week came out a bit longer than usual, so I shall preserve housekeeping issues for a future edition and proceed directly to my first segment. Continue reading →

The American Ideology

Posted on March 28, 2025 by thezman

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One of the greatest tricks Americans have ever pulled is convincing themselves and the world that we are not ideologues. At worst, we are the defenders of Western liberalism, which is never described as an ideology. Unlike communism or fascism, it is seen as a set of obvious conclusions arrived at through reason. If anything, the American way is considered a practical antidote to the problems of ideology.

This has always been nonsense, but we have believed it for so long that no one thinks much about it anymore. The closest we get are critiques of liberalism from neo-traditionalists, as if we still live in a liberal age. In reality, America is an ideological state and has been for a long time. The ideology has evolved to suit the times, but the core features have remained unchanged since the 19th century.

This is one reason for the current crisis. The age of ideology is coming to a close, but the United States, especially its ruling class, remains trapped in the age of ideology—like a dinosaur stuck in a tar pit. While other major powers think and talk in practical terms about practical problems, the United States continues to think and talk in explicitly moral terms about abstract concepts.

That is the show this week. It is an exploration of American ideology and the factors that made it possible. This is a topic that could fill up several more shows, so this episode is just a quick summary of the material. I could easily do at least one show on how the two great industrial wars warped the American perspective. The Cold War could be at least one episode, probably two, so this is just a starting point.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

Intro
American Protestantism
Nationalism
Progressivism
Judeo-Puritanism
The End Ideology

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Car

Posted on March 27, 2025 by thezman

Last week the Chinese announced what could be a great leap forward in electric car technology when the Chinese firm BYD announced a five-minute charger. They claim their new technology, it is not just a charger but a battery system as well, will allow a driver to get a 250-mile charge in just five minutes. No one knows if this is true, as Chinese companies are almost as dishonest as American media. Even if it is an exaggeration, it could still be a big deal.

The reason this is viewed as a potential game changer is that it is assumed that the main obstacle to widespread adoption of EV’s is the long recharge. It is unreasonable to expect people to take an hour to recharge when on a road trip. Even a thirty-minute recharge time is unappealing. Decades of needing just a few minutes to fill the tank have conditioned people to expect it. Getting EV technology to this point, therefore, is assumed to be the final boss in the game.

That is not true, but the faithful believe it. The main problem with EV’s is that they do not solve a problem. They are a solution in search of problem and so far, the problems they claim to solve have proven to be either nonsense or grotesque boondoggles executed by the worst people in society. Making the weather potato happy is not motivating anyone to buy an electric car, especially when the total cost of ownership remains significantly higher than conventional vehicles.

The electric car is a lot like the electric book in that the engineering challenges somehow blind the proponents to the central problem. Technology is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Electronic messaging has displaced written letters because the former is better, cheaper, and faster than the latter. If email came with a small risk of electrocution, we would still be writing letters. If every email cost a dollar to send, there would be no such thing as email.

That was the problem with eBooks. They were not better in any way that mattered to people, and they were not cheaper. There were some advantages, like speed of acquisition and the availability of obscure texts. You could also load up on out of copyright material at a pittance. The trouble is not many people need ready access to Summa Theologica, so these advantages made little difference. It is why the old-fashioned book remains dominant.

The same problem plagues the electric car. For ninety percent of drivers, the car is a practical way to move humans from one place to another. Current technology does that as well as anyone could need. Therefore, the new technology is simply trying to match what the old technology does. Outside of enthusiast and technologists, the electric car will always be pointless. Add in the expense and it becomes an expensive solution to a cheaply solved problem.

There are other reasons why the electric car will remain a niche item. The biggest is the cost, which can never be overcome. The cost of powering an electric car is about three times that of powering a normal car. This is despite the fact that we subsidize electricity in America, and we artificially increase the price of gas and diesel. Strip away the policy choices and electric cars have no market. Natural gas-powered cars would have far more promise as an alternative.

Then there is the cost of production and disposal. For generations old cars have been sent to the scrap yard to be stripped for parts and recycled. We have become amazingly good at recycling our cars. Electric vehicles require special handling due to the batteries. Of course, the cost of production is much higher, even with government subsidies all along the way. Then there is the added cost to the power grid that comes in once adoption reaches a certain point.

Enthusiasts insist that all of this is wrong or can be addressed, but the point here is that the charge time is the least of their worries. If the EV was better, faster, and cheaper than regular cars, the charge time would be ignored. The truth is they are not better in any important ways, they are certainly not cheaper. The electric car is certainly faster, but outside the enthusiast niche, this does not matter and what we see is that it does not matter to the sports car enthusiast either.

Now, of course, there is a new problem. The electric car is not cool. It was never really a cool car, but the beautiful people embraced the idea, so that provided the necessary social proof for upper-middle-class white people. The trend setters are now vandalizing Tesla’s, so the cool factor is gone. In fairness, the novelty was wearing off before the kooks took aim at Elon Musk, but now the coolness is gone. The ridiculous looking cyber truck did not help either.

The bigger issue may be a social one. Cars in general, but electric cars, in particular, make the “owner” into a serf. Fixing your own car is now an expensive proposition, meaning you need to depend on the repair system. This is deliberate. Car dealerships make more profit from the repair of cars than the sale of them, so the game is to make the owner dependent on the dealer. Electric cars are the worst for this as they are terrifyingly dangerous to repair.

The most terrifying part is you may not even own the car. You pay for it and have the title, but features are increasingly dependent on the manufacture agreeing with your lifestyle and political choices. Tesla can disable your car remotely. Other car makers are going down this same path. Soon, features like heated seats will be software as a service, meaning you must get permission to use them. The electric car is the face of this dystopian future of man and machine.

None of this means the electric car is dead. There is a place for the technology, just as there is a niche for eBooks. The developers churning out corporate housing projects could install fast charging stations for the soulless automatons who move into these God-forsaken eyesores. Urban areas could be a good use for electric microcars that only go short distances. Young people could also benefit from cars that can be speed limited and tracked at all times.

In the end, the electric car is going to follow the path of other clever engineering projects in that its primary benefit is secondary. The quest for the electric car has made batteries much better. The hunt for new features to justify the cost premium has led to better electronics, information displays and safety features. The dangers of disposal have been a good lesson in reality. The cars themselves may be niche items, but the industry will have benefitted from the exercise.

A Reasonable End

Posted on March 26, 2025 by thezman

Did cavemen feel guilt? Shame? It may sound like a stupid and pointless question, but it is a place to start when trying to understand the current crisis. While we cannot know if primitive man felt things like shame, we can guess. In fact, that is the point of the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. Shame and guilt were not natural to men until introduced by devilish forces. At least that is what the authors of the Adam and Eve story surmised when trying to answer those questions.

To feel guilt one must have a guilty mind when committing some act, which means you knew the act was wrong when you did it. You can also feel guilt for having unknowingly broken a rule but learning after the fact that you broke the rule and should have known you were breaking the rule. Shame works the same way. It is impossible to feel guilt for having broken a rule if you never know about the rule or you reject the legitimacy of the rule or the authority that made the rule.

Our cavemen therefore could only feel guilt or shame if in their group there existed a set of normative rules from a recognized authority. Given the simplicity of their life and the demands of it, they probably had few rules on individual conduct. Those that did exist were most likely related to the preservation of the group. Males had to be good hunters and not avoid pulling their weight in the hunt. Members had to sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. That was about it for their morality.

To answer the question at the start, the sense of guilt and shame was probably as primitive as the moral code that existed within the group. Given that early bands of humans were surely based on blood, as in they were extended families, not propositional collections of strangers, things like guilt and shame arose from the biological loyal that lies at the heart of man. We abide by the rules of our kind because they are our family, and we have a natural loyalty to them.

This works fine in small groups, but once small groups started to band together to defend hunting grounds and defensible shelters, something more was needed to extend that natural sense of loyalty to the whole group. The trading of women, which we know was a part of early man’s existence, was one solution. This binds the groups by blood and therefore tapped into biological loyalty. The human sciences tell us that the formation of larger human groups was biological.

This works with a federation of kin groups, but once human settlements reached a large enough size, this was no longer practical, so something else arrived. The solution to the limits of blood was religion, specifically gods. Distantly related people may not feel a great loyalty to one another, but those protected by the same god can feel loyalty to one another in service to that god. Guilt and shame over breaking god’s rules works just as well as guilt and shame over harming the family.

A crude way of summarizing this is we went from, “We are the sons of Grog and this is how the sons of Grog live” to “We are the people who live by this portion of the river, and this is how we live.” The next logical step was, “We are the followers of sky god, and this is how we live.” This allows for the group to expand, as new members merely must accept sky god and be accepted by sky god. It harnesses guilt and shame in the service of a group whose size extends beyond blood.

While the mental state of early man is a bit of a guess for us, we do know that humans organized around their gods. This was the state of the ancient world, about which we know a great deal. While what led to this stage of human development is a bit of guesswork, we know that mankind arrived at this point. By the time there are fully formed gods, there are fully formed moral codes attached to them that define large groups of people with a sense of identity.

That does not solve the puzzle of this age. We know that folk religions eventually gave way to universal religions. About ninety percent of humans belong to a universal religion, which means their religion is open to everyone. You do not have to be born into Hinduism to be a Hindu. Only a tiny portion of humanity sticks with folk religions like Judaism which have a biological component. Everyone else is open to people outside the blood, as long as they accept the moral claims of the faith.

Of course, universalist religion did not end human conflict. In fact, they probably made it worse as the base assumption of universalist religion is that there is only one way to live because there is only one moral authority. Once you accept that your god is the only god, it means the other gods are false. Worse yet, those gods are an afront to your god and they must be eliminated. The way to do that is to conquer the people who are offering up the false god as a challenge to the true god.

The modern West has complicated this further by removing God entirely from the Christian moral framework and replacing him with a mirror called reason. It is reason that tells us that there must be one way of organizing society. It is reason that tells us there must be one moral code. Therefore, it is reason that tells us that alternative ways of organizing society must be false. The same is true for alternative morality, which like a false god, is an afront to reason.

If you think about it, this iteration of the Great Awakening has been little more than the believers of one god attacking those who either reject their god or worship another God, like the God of the Bible. Not only do they hate your lack of guilt over violating their codes, but they also feel guilty for not imposing those codes on you. The followers of the god of reason ended up at witch burning as the solution to heresy. They seek salvation through the spilling of blood.

The crisis in the West is a crisis of reason. We have reasoned ourselves to a dead end where shame and guilt are tied to the assertion that there must be only one moral authority, and it emits only one moral code. Those who must have the warm embrace of faith now target their sense of guilt and shame toward their own kind, for the sin of not embracing what they believe is the only moral code. The rest are left to defend themselves and civilization from the true believers.

The question at the heart of the crisis is can the fury of these zealots be reoriented toward a folk religion or even a passive universalism? If the answer is no, then how can society defend against them? Another way of stating it is, can the cancer be put into remission or must it be removed? It is a terrible question that no one wants to face, but the West must face it. The god of reason is either reformed or removed along with her followers as that is the only reasonable thing to do.

The Priestly Class

Posted on March 25, 2025 by thezman

One of the features of the first Trump administration was the endless litigation that was intended to throw sand in the gears of the White House. Much of it was irrational and did not hold up under appeal, but that was not the point. The goal was to kill the administration with a thousand cuts. We are seeing a replay of this in round two, but the administration seems prepared for it. There is both a legal strategy and a public relations strategy for dealing with the lawfare.

This lawfare is possible due to one of the many carryovers from the post-Cold War period in which the Washington class was allowed to run wild. The inferior courts where this lawfare is being waged are packed with friends of Washington. Half of the judges were nominated by Republicans and the other half by Democrats, but all were on the list because they are friends of the Blob. Time and again we see that the judges issuing restraining orders on the admin have family in the Blob.

One result of this is the ground floor of the federal judiciary is now the first line of defense for the Blob. Anyone challenging the regulatory state knows they first must make it through this minefield. It is one way to make the cost of challenging the regulatory state prohibitive. Almost all litigation against the administrative state would fail at the first step and then go to appeal. For most potential litigants, dealing with the hyper-politicized district courts was cost prohibitive.

Mostly, the district courts have become a weird form of patronage. These judges come from good schools but were not great private practice attorneys. Most found their way into a federal prosecutor’s office, where they could make friends with the political class to angle for a position on the bench. Once on the bench, they could then lever that into jobs for friends and family in the Blob. District judges are one of the many gatekeepers for entry into the Blob.

Here is where you see the social aspect of managerialism. These judges do not have to be told to oppose the Trump admin. They just know it is their role because everyone they know hates Trump. Judge Boasberg is not defending what he has always claimed to oppose because he is a hypocrite. He is simply putting the welfare of his friends and family ahead of political concerns. He is operating from class consciousness and the class he is defending is the managerial class.

Of course, the court system has been a mess for a long time. The Supreme Court that decided Brown simply invented a new moral code to be imposed on the American people by the judiciary. The court that invented the right to buy contraceptives and abort your baby was doing the same thing. When Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion stating that the right to marry is a fundamental right, he did so not as a legal scholar or defender of the Constitution, but as a secular priest.

The judiciary as a priestly class is always a risk because in a liberal political order the law is the manifestation of general morality. One reason we have so many laws in public government versus private government is the morally right choice for every conceivable action must be written down so the shamans in the court system have something to point to when making their declarations. That and it is the only way to overcome the traditions of the people regarding public morality.

It is how in 1985, US District Court Judge Russell Clark began a terror campaign against the people of Missouri. He took over the Kansas City, Missouri School District, forcing the people to pay billions in taxes to underwrite his madman effort to create paradise on earth. This terror campaign was allowed to go on for a decade until the Supreme Court finally got around to ending it. Two billion dollars were spent, and thousands of lives were ruined by a single lunatic judge.

What the district court system has become is a way for the managerial class to impose its morality on the rest of us, via the court system. Since there are over six hundred district judges, there is no escaping them. Every state government must act in the shadow of what is, in effect, an ideological enforcer for the Blob. The district courts are now an ecclesiastical court for the purpose of heading off any signs of apostacy before they gain public support.

In the short term, the only remedy for the Trump administration is to fight this weird priesthood in the court and the court of public opinion. Congress could help by stripping some power from the district courts, but Republicans are useless, so no one should expect that to happen. Chief Judge Roberts could step in, but he is clearly blobbed up, so that is unlikely. His behavior in the Obamacare case made clear he acted under duress to change his position.

In the long run, the solution is to make the district court position temporary, so it loses its value in Washington. Doing a turn as a district judge should be viewed as a resume builder for someone on partner track at a big firm or maybe as a career builder for a lawyer who wants to build his own firm. District judges were supposed to handle mundane administrative tasks to free up the superior court. Making it a steppingstone position would restore that function.

In the even longer run, normalizing the judiciary means the end of ideology, because as long as we remain an ideological state, there will be people who see themselves as priests tasked with enforcing the moral claims of the ideology. The death of ideology means morality is once against rooted in the traditions and customs of the people and the law has a process for that. It is called precedent. Since before Code of Ur-Nammu, this has been the basis of the law and an orderly society.

Masters And Slaves

Posted on March 24, 2025 by thezman

Note #1: Behind the green door, there is a post about why deporting anti-Israel protestors is a good start, a post about the dangers of the Ukraine tarpit, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here. I was also on the J. Burden show last week and you can listen here.

Note #2: Since we are getting signs of spring, it means it will not be long before it is hot, which means t-shirt weather. Just in time for t-shirt season, we have a new shirt for The Occidental Club, which you can buy here.

One of the stranger things about the first months of the Trump administration has been the reaction of Europe to his peace initiatives. The European “leaders” are, on the one hand, horrified by his peace push, and on the other hand they have rallied themselves to various schemes to stop them. The latest scheme is to create a peacekeeping force that they will insert into Ukraine, something the Russians have repeatedly said is a deal breaker and perhaps even an act of war.

On the surface this looks insane. There are about twenty million Ukrainian refugees in Europe with more trickling in daily. Social welfare rolls are now littered with refugees, who do not speak the local language, so they cannot work. Of course, the EU has been shipping Ukraine billions of Euros plus all its military gear. The war has become another factor eroding social trust and most importantly, trust in the political elite that insists the war must go on forever.

None of this makes any sense until you think about what it means to be in the European political elite in 2025. It means a lifetime of having been very good at winning favor with America or winning favor with the politicians close to America. The dominance of the United States since the war, but especially since the end of the Cold War, has turned the European elite into a slave class. They are the house slaves, who defend the master’s prerogatives against the field slaves.

The surest way to getting yourself exiled in European politics is to speak poorly of the Americans in favor of European interests. Even now, when they all agree Trump is a big meanie, they are obsessed with getting his attention in such a way that it reasserts their position as the loyal house slave. With respect to Ukraine, they feel like they have been sent out of the room as the master talks to another master. They all have their ear to the door, hoping to hear what is being said.

What we are seeing is the result of long subjugation. When one people come to dominate another people, the subjugated will inevitably look to survive and that means finding leaders who are good at currying favor with the master. After the war, Europe was a mess and needed the United States to stave off communism and rebuild the economy of Europe. After the Cold War, the United States was the lone superpower, and Europe became its chief flunky.

It is why there will be no European Donald Trump anytime soon. The idea of such a character terrifies the typical European, who has been conditioned since birth to look up to the house slave. Since a Donald Trump like figure must come from the field slave population, this sort of figure is not just feared by the European house slave population but despised by the field slaves of Europe. They would rather been hacked to death by a machete wielding African than taste freedom.

This also explains the absurdity of the European political class. It is a freak show of carnival acts rather than people with some idea how the world works. You see the same thing in the United States among the black population. Every black congressional district has a ridiculous person as the representative. The newest version is Jasmine Crockett, a representative from Houston, who had to learn how to sound like a ghetto queen in order to rise up the ranks.

The reason Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers had to hire the actor Barry Soetoro to play Barak Obama was that the black community is not able to produce such a figure, so they had to manufacture one. The reason Obama has so quickly disappeared from the conversation is that he was always just an actor playing a role. The show ended and he left the stage. Like a typecast actor, he can only play this role and no one has much interest in the character, so he has sunk into obscurity.

We seem to be seeing something similar with other minority communities in the United States, despite the demographic changes. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is a fast-rising Asian politician, but she is also an Asian version of Maxine Waters. The reason anyone knows her name is she is willing to perform in front of the cameras, aping the most absurd politics of upper middle-class white people. She is the East Asian version of the Sambo, dancing for her primarily white audience.

A main difference between the minority populations in America and Europe is the United States is actively trying to set Europe free. If Trump could do it, he would leave Europe entirely but he will settle for a reduced role. No one is seriously thinking about creating a black homeland or Asian homeland in America. The Trump administration actively talks about Europe standing on its own two feet again. This is why the current European elite is in such a panic. They do not want to leave the master’s house.

The question with regards to Europe is can it regain itself and do so in a way that does not require the great powers to supervise it? The glimmer of hope is the nationalist parties emerging, but they are often as clownish as the establishment. That or they exist to prevent an alternative elite emerging. Nigel Farage is an entertaining political clown whose main role is to prevent any sort of organized resistance to the nation-wrecking policies of the UK political class.

The answer may be that Europe will have to go through a dark age, so to speak, before it can produce a genuine alternative elite. Given the current demographic trends, what would emerge would be non-European. Alternatively, the nationalist movements gain power and simply ruin the existing political elite and their slave mentality. There is a period of chaos, like the end of communism in Russia, that provides the conditions for a new elite to emerges to rule Europe.

What we see in Europe and America is a good example of how success sets the conditions for decline. Conquering people makes them into dependents and eventually, their dependency becomes too much to carry. The United States is about to cut the Europeans loose for this reason. What suffering comes from the newly liberated house slaves of Europe will seem unfair to them, but three generations of dependency are the cause, not their impending liberation.

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